This month's splinters:
Spectacle of Terror I
by Samir Gandesha
In a celebrated passage of Confessions, St. Augustine asks: “What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know: but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I know not.” When one asks: What is terrorism then? If no one asks us, we know: but if we are desirous to explain it to one that should ask us, plainly we do not know. Images of terror are ubiquitous yet no term is more contested and more opaque than ‘terrorism.’ We both know and do not know what it is. Terrorism’s effect – which, of course, principally lies in its affect – is transmitted and felt not via the event-like eruption violence of itself, but via the spectacular threat of its purely arbitrary, contingent random manifestation. Terrorists don’t trade in fear as such, insofar as fear takes a specific, finite object, but rather an infinite atmospheric anxiety. We might look to Guy Debord to shed light on the spectacle of terror.
As is well-known, in his epochal Society of the Spectacle, published over fifty years ago, Debord divides the spectacle into its concentrated and diffuse forms. The former is that of fascism, in which the spectacle revolves around the cult of personality of leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. The latter manifests itself in post-war consumer society, dominated by advertising images in which the worker participates not simply in the shadowy realm of production but also in the glittery realm of consumption, which is how capitalism manages to solve, within the framework of the nation-state, its accumulation crises.
